“Indeed I would say that the sine qua non for everything that is worthwhile in architecture is Thought”
Yehuda E. Safran


Pedro Barreto - You came to Oporto to participate in a series of conferences on the significance of Mies today. Is Mies still a reference for architecture and architects today?

Yehuda Safran - Yes because “today” is a term that is difficult and misleading. If something is of value than it is for any other time, thus Mies still holds a new value for new architects. New architects have achieved the same degree of thoughtfulness that as he did, that is above all why he arouse my attention.

Pedro Barreto - In the introductory essay of the exhibition catalogue you have written a genealogy of the idea of abstraction. Did Mies really know this genealogy; this philosophical family of thought or did he just pop up in a milieu where this family’s influence was felt?

Yehuda Safran - This exhibition is the outcome of the book. The book is not a catalogue. It was conceived as a independent book on Mies, as a book on the concept of Mies and an examination of the issue of abstraction. Mies participated in an environment where the issue of abstraction was very important. Alois Riehl, his first client, was the most important authority and a teacher of philosophy in Berlin who taught Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The combination of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is indeed the formulation which gave rise to abstraction in European art and architecture, especially in the Northern countries (not Latin countries). There was also the teaching of Ernst Mach, very important for Central European painters, like Kupke who was the first to make abstract paintings, he was originally Czech and very much influenced by Ernst Mach. Adolf Loos also: he wrote on a review of Mach’s book. So this was another kind of road to abstraction, if you like... but in the case of Mies it was more exclusively in my view, theoretically, Schopenhauer introduced by Riehl in whose house he was a constant member, and of course Heinrich Wölfflinn, to whom the future wife of Mies was actually engaged, who was very much responsible for abstraction and the thinking of abstraction in Europe by that time.

Pedro Barreto - For a Latin reader Schopenhauer rings some bells but we do not know much about him apart from the fact that he wrote the influential The World as Will and Representation. How did his ideas and later those of Nietzsche, affect Mies and to what extent could this thinking have shaped the idea of abstraction for Mies?

Yehuda Safran - Above all, abstraction, as it appears in western culture, appears every time the community and collective representation is weak, it appears for example, and very evidently so, in early Christian and late Roman art: the flatness of representation and the geometrical control, become more important and relevant precisely in proportion to the extent in which individuals have to rely in their own judgement, that is, without looking dependent and proportional to the Greek which they call “activity unable to provide such certain thesis”. Schopenhauer is important above all in showing us exactly how independent our mind is of the world, the world of experience, the world out-there, the world of empathy, of sensory perception of the outside. He shows how much every object of experience is determined by our own representation of it.
The Will in Schopenhauer’s sense relates to the projection of the mind itself on the world, thus determining that what we see and recognize, what we experience as an object, becomes determined by this projections of the mind and in so far as this representations are relatively independent of the collectivity, you get the kind of abstraction that you find in the work of Mies.

Pedro Barreto - So what we are talking about is that Schopenhauer reshaped the idea that an Artist is some one capable of a poiesis, not a mimesis, that is, that an artist is someone who transforms the world through his work.

Yehuda Safran - … he is condemned to transform the world. The world is what it is, as it is, in his representation. You could say that we do not know how things are in themselves; in order to know them we have to rely on this projection which makes them seen as if the world was actually dark, and how our seeing acts as a projection of light that grasps the shape of things and brings them into our field of vision.

Pedro Barreto - Does this light that we are speaking of, have any relation with the Apollinian brilliance of reason as opposed to the Dionisiac ecstasy of feeling that Nietzsche spoke of?

Yehuda Safran - Nietzsche suddenly and certainly came after Schopenhauer and “Will to Power” is as valid as to the Will that Schopenhauer speaks of, because Nietzsche understood more painfully and better than anybody else the extent to which what we know of the world depends on what we project on that world, that is, on what comes from us and how much this freedom is in need of being exercised, and of course, needs to be acted upon. Otherwise we are condemned to take for granted what collectively we agree to consider as reality and that is, of course, a very big burden. The burden is that collectively we agree that the world is what we collectively think it is, but at the same time it is up to us to choose. Architecture is very much one of the focuses in which these issues have been always thought, and will continue to be thought, because above all, architecture is a kind of collective representation of what the world is like and it is right so. And this is also the reason why the work of Mies is so important for us. But not only Mies: Adolf Loos, Hans Scharoun, Sigurd Lewerentz, shortly, the work of any architect that has succeeded in overcoming the collective prejudices and in producing something that is true to itself.

Pedro Barreto - But Mies is maybe special. After all, you dedicated ten years of your life studying Mies and Mies architecture.

Yehuda Safran - Yes, I did, but not exclusively. I found it necessary to study Mies’s work because if there was someone who was able to reach far in that direction, Mies was one of those. That is, to make the thing itself what it is, rather than to mix it with other collective representations.

Pedro Barreto - So, for you, there is no place for symbolism: symbolism refers always to an other. It is a substitute for the real thing. For you, it is the thing itself that matters...

Yehuda Safran - Where there is symbolism, there are already cultural concepts. I think we live in a period in which we clearly cannot say what things are, we can say what things are not. The paradox in architecture resides precisely in that showing us how things are not, it shows us how things are. Only indirectly do we come to know how the world is like. In that sense, I think concepts are true in what they deny, and false in what they assert. This via negativa is a difficult one, but perhaps the only one that we can reliably travel on. That is, we cannot assert directly what things are, but we can provide some kind of Insertion, that is, something that polarizes, something that reflects, something that, in its refraction, allows us to see what the world is like. Indirectly, it could be through a dark glass…

Pedro Barreto - Yesterday in your conference, entitled “Mies van der Rohe and the Truth in Architecture” you surprised the audience mainly because they were expecting a thorough analysis of the construction details. I mean, people associate “Mies is Truth because his details are technically perfect”. On the other hand, we also know that these details are themselves a representation of truth in the sense that sometimes he has shaped elements, like columns, for instance, in a way which is not exclusively tectonic. As we know since Charles Jenks`s critique, the central idea of these steel columns is not to support something, it is indeed to achieve a representation of these buildings as edge technology and sophistication.... in the end, it is pure rhetoric…

Yehuda Safran - Representation, rather.

Pedro Barreto - I mean it is not technique that interests Mies, is it? It is the “thingness” of technique, is it not?

Yehuda Safran - You know, as I have written in my book on Mies, “every technique has its metaphysics, every metaphysics has its own technique”… But I must confess that I’m not that much interested in what the Germans call Weltanschauung, that is a representation of the world shared deep within by a certain culture or cultural group. I’m interested above all in the difficult way in which every form of making tells something about what we think the world is… and of course, when we tell something about what we think the world is, above all, we are telling something about ourselves. I can imagine that students of architecture are often encouraged to think in terms of die Welt, of our world today and what is going on there, or in terms of technique, and so on… Unfortunately, only a small number is encouraged to think in terms of Thinking. The thought that gives rise to a particular way of creative activity, writing, sculpting, construction details in architecture, etc. is equally important. I would say, more important. Indeed I would say that the sine qua non for everything that is worthwhile in architecture is Thought.

Pedro Barreto - Is it where Friedrich Kiesler and Adolf Loos pop-up in your personal trajectory as an architectural historian and critic ? Why did you think it was necessary to study them deeply?

Yehuda Safran - Well, more Loos than Kiesler, really. I came across Kiesler more indirectly an also in relation to this architectural environment which I developed from Loos onwards and those people that were somehow either influenced by him or who worked around him, like Eileen Gray. Kiesler came into my work because of Loos and the ambiance of architecture of the Twenties. There was a very moving moment in which Mies and Van Doesburg were among the first to acknowledge the mastery of Kiesler when he did the stage set for the play RUR, by Karl Çapek, where the word Robot was invented and appeared for the first time. Kiesler did the stage set for it in Berlin and Mies and Van Doesburg were among the first ones to congratulate him. They were very surprised that Kiesler was such a tiny little man and they lifted him, literally! All these people were new for each other and well connected, and naturally that was part of what drew me to that. They shared some cultural predicaments of the time. Obviously, Mies and Kiesler were younger than Loos. Later in America, Kiesler and Mies continued to communicate. I never particularly addressed this issue before in my works on these two figures. To my view, they represent responses to comparable contingencies. In the case of Kiesler, it is very different; his is more fantastical and more personal.

Kiesler as Mies, 1940

Pedro Barreto - In Kiesler, we see him working around what we could inadvertently call the very materialization of the Futuristic, but it is rather strange that he ends his life inside Bucephalus — that is, inside an uterus, like the Endless House also, this is not a linear path, is it?

Yehuda Safran - No, but Bucephalus doesn’t represent a interior in the work of Kiesler. It is has to do with rationality. Bucephalus was the horse of Alexander the Great. The myth states that no one could ride that horse. Alexander said he could ride it, and his father finally agreed. He then understood what was special about this horse, Bucephalus, was afraid of his own shadow, a human characteristic, and so he turned the horse versus the sun and then he rode the horse against the sun. The fact that Kiesler did this Bucephalus in the end of his life has maybe to do with his difficulties with rationality.

Pedro Barreto - You told us that Loos is a different situation: it seems as if Loos could act as a monad of the time of the decline of an empire and also a crisis between a time that was not coming back, and modernity. In Kiesler, in the other hand, you can’t see this monad quality. What did draw your attention to Loos - because it seems that in Loos there is crystalization of a collective crisis and polemics?

Yehuda Safran - Yes. Architecture can not be much better or much different from the time in which it takes place. You can see clearly how Loos really looked to a kind of middle ground solution. Raumplan was a way of bringing the complexity of the city inside the house, in order to overcome the difficulties in participating in the life of the city, to interiorise. Loos does a miniature of the city with the Raumplan of the house. Mies was growing towards something more open, towards creating a kind of stage set for life in the contemporary city. The Tugendhat house, in Brno, was built at the same time as Loos built the Muller house in Prague. The different solutions show different ways of life, almost totally opposite. In Prague, the Muller house has a complete kind of universe. There is a complexity of relationship between parts that we call the Raumplan, different plan in different level, the complexity is such that it is almost as if he wants to tell you that you can live the life of the city without moving outside the house. There is sometimes a view of seeing the city from the interior of the house that is quite extraordinary. The way in which the city is related to that house, in Brno, is of a very different nature of the house by Mies. Mies is presenting a series of spaces that relate to each other without creating to much of the middle ground, foreground and background. Its more a kind of epic creation in which there is a space that overcomes this differences so that wherever you are, you are expected to participate in a universality which transcends those divisions of program, middle ground, background. As you enter the Tugendhat house, you are entering a space that is open to the infinite horizon. This house is in the opposite direction to the Muller house of Loos. Here, we have the same predicament, a family house, that is answered in very different terms. In Vienna, in the Moller house, this is even more so: the Moller and the Tugendhat clients were both from the textile industry. It all began in a theatrical fashion, in Paris, in the house for Tristan Tzara, his first essay in the Raumplan (1926). Álvaro Siza, in the building of the Faculty of Architecture in Oporto, pays a kind of homage to this house. But this Raumplan has a mask and this mask is the facade....

Pedro Barreto - So you do think that the almost nothingness of the exterior expression of the houses of Loos is a mask?

Yehuda Safran - Oh, it is!!

Pedro Barreto - It is not autism.

Yehuda Safran - No! It is a mask. And sometimes it gets a kind of anthropomorphic trait. In the main facade of the Moller house, for instance. In Prague you have four facades and four different masks. The house is very prominent and can be seen from a great distance. Again, the attitude between these two architects is different: the facade of the Muller house is as inexpressive as possible. It is a mask but also a kind of skin that separates from the exterior. Mies’s approach is different. There is no such opposition. The ideal of Loos was to achieve a culture where there is a balance between the internal and the external, but balance does not mean equivalence. In Mies, the skin is transparent and accommodating. It is not a skin of resistance but a skin of communication that communicates inside/out.

Pedro Barreto - What about Álvaro Siza: when we talk about Siza there is this narrative about his architecture being at a certain time critical regionalism, an expression that arrived to as through Kenneth Frampton. What is the general idea that you’ve got about Siza’s work?

Yehuda Safran - I think that the so-called critical regionalism was a fiction from the beginning. As I said to Frampton, “in so far as it was critical, it was not regional and as so far as it was regional, it was not critical”! And indeed Frampton’s response was “yes, perhaps it is a Red Herring” meaning something that from the beginning never really existed. Siza’s work enters in architectural conversations with architects all over the world, whether it is Carlo Scarpa in Italy, or Aalto in Finland or again Loos in central Europe. The question of being critical is completely marginal. Of course, there is always a Portuguese accent to it, but he is really addressing universal architectural issues. The great poet writes normally in his own language. But what he writes about is of universal relevance and empathy. And besides, in the best creative works of art you always find a conversation between creators, present and past: particularly between those who make the same questions and end up giving different answers. Nobody can nevertheless speak every language. Ërno Goldfinger used to tell a story on his meeting with Loos in Paris: “he asked where did I come from and when I answered Scandinavia he exclaimed: strange that you came from so far in order to learn to speak Esperanto”. It’s surprising enough that Loos considered Le Corbusier work to be Esperanto but even more so that he didn’t consider his own work, which wasn’t local or regional, to be Esperanto.

Pedro Barreto - If we substitute critical regionalism for critical of the post-modern offensive on modernism, do you think that the work of Siza was actually proposing the continuation of a modernity that was by then being changed, from within, into post-modernity?

Yehuda Safran - What makes a work critical is the way it doubts any dogma or assumption. If somebody is capable of questioning and not taking much for granted his work becomes critical, meaning actually “to bring things to a crisis, to reject any dogma, to re-problematize”.

Pedro Barreto - Light is different in Mies, in Loos and in Siza. In Loos light is used to create silhouettes, back lighting. In Mies it is this permanently changing, blurred, frontier between shade and light...

Yehuda Safran - Both Loos and Mies were architects to the north of the Alps, not extreme north where the architects are paradoxically, as interested and obsessed with light and its plasticity as in the Mediterranean. Between north and south, in this middle latitude light has a different kind of position. In Mies, light is of course important but it is less shaped, less plastic and it has this all over, this sprawl quality. In the south, light is modelled and plastic.

Pedro Barreto - As you know, throughout all modern movement official historiography, Mies’s space has been considered fluid, dynamic and free. Only recently did experts begin to say that Mies space is static. Yesterday you spoke of the static mis en scene of Adolphe Appia’s theatrical scenography as an important influence on Mies.

Yehuda Safran - Appia, who was originally from Switzerland, was then in Germany, in Hellerau, and he was among the first to conceptualise the abstract stage for the theatre and opera. For him and Delcroze the juxtaposition of light, movement sound and music was as much an aim as the way to integrate the “collective body”. For this to have a maximum effect the space thus conceived had to be of a static nature. Normally people ignore Mies presence in the intellectual circle of Hellerau, where Appia worked, because the effects of this time showed up much later in Mies work. But what is true of many artists and architects is that they take a long time to integrate influences and impressions and integrate them into their work. For Mies it took around 13 years to incorporate into his architecture what he used to witness in the stagers by Appia every weekend when he was in Hellerau courtshiping Ilda Brunn. By then Appia and his work was well known — he also influenced the early Le Corbusier when he was working with the purist painter Amadée Ozenfant.

Pedro Barreto - Who is Yehuda E. Safran, where do you situate yourself?

Yehuda Safran - Good question. Nevertheless I do not answer this question myself. Today, there is too much talk on identities. I personally do not believe in identities as a question to be answered in definite terms. We are all involved in different kinds of adventures in which is not always useful to ask about one’s identity. I think it is much more useful to be able to articulate the appropriate mask to the appropriate task. It’s true that we are condemned to identities in plural terms in so far as life is a play-like situation we do wear different masks to play different characters and I ‘m one of these players. One of those that try to recognize the meaning and qualities of these different possibilities. In a field which is in my view quite determined in many other ways. Nevertheless, we are not elastic. There is a limit to where we can stretch ourselves... humanly speaking. Identity as such as done a great damage to individuals and collectives. There is more promise in overcoming these so called identities. Engaging in a dialog across cultures and languages — this is where I found myself.

Pedro Barreto - What is your commitment to your students be it at Columbia University or other place, be they artists or architects?

Yehuda Safran – Education, educatio, is something that has to do with “opening up”, and establishing a wide horizon as possible. Above all it is to draw attention to the kind of inalienable gifts that one is born with, like rational insight, like pain and pleasure or love for a fair world. Or the paradoxical knowledge of something that is “unknowable” which is nameless. My role as somebody who teaches at schools of architecture and art and as a critic is precisely to draw attention to this immense possibilities given in the inalienable gift to which anyone is the beneficiary of. Architecture is a gift that we have to learn how to receive, and how to give it again. We do not invent many things ourselves. We have to find in ourselves the capacities and resources with which we are able to receive what we are given, in order to be able to give it a gain in a reformulated version.

Pedro Barreto - Thank you for the interview.




This interview took place in Oporto at the year 2000, during the presentation of the book, “Mies Van Der Rohe” by Yehuda E. Safran.



Yehuda E. Safran is an architectural/art critic and Associate Professor at Columbia University.

Pedro Barreto is a Portuguese architect, journalist and teacher of architecture theory.